Growing the Enterprise Accounts
What is it like growing the enterprise accounts? Think of it as cultivating barren land to produce useful crops. And what does it take? Long-term mindset, deep planning, orchestrating many teams and parallel execution.
This note highlights successful methods from the experience of top sales performers.
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Populating the Target Account List with Large Accounts
By definition, there are a lesser number of large accounts versus small-to-midsize accounts. Leaning towards large accounts while creating the Target Account List has valuable benefits:
One large account dwarfs many equal split small-to-midsize accounts combined. Leverage less to create more!
Treating Account as the Unit of Measurement
Accounts define salespeople. Treat account(s) as the unit of measurement for recognition. And quota achievement as the unit of measurement for compensation. This applies to both hunters and farmers. It builds ownership, holds weight and simplifies sales.
This makes account plans the starting point for discussions with the sales team. It is like detailed planning before a special forces mission. A good account plan includes these components:
In essence, depth is key. Salespeople should master the process of growing one account. And then tweak it to create a playbook for replicating across future accounts.
Building Account-Focused Teams
Acquiring a new client and growing the client are two distinct sales processes. Account stakeholders' knowledge of your product and startup will change during this time. They will interact more with the startup team and use the product once they are a customer. Intimacy reduces the room for error. Account stakeholders will have expectations from the product and the team. Hence, creating account-focused teams early-on is a good idea. This also ensures the core engineering team is not the first line of interruption. Following team designs have yielded high growth:
Leveraging the Land and Expand Strategy
Once inside the account, the salesperson should figure out a way to create a home base within the account. This can be a combination of regular physical presence and high-frequency remote interactions. Four well-executed strategies can help create compounding revenue growth:
Growing the enterprise accounts takes a different mindset than cracking them. Happy scaling!
This note highlights successful methods from the experience of top sales performers.
Previous Note:
Related Notes:
Populating the Target Account List with Large Accounts
By definition, there are a lesser number of large accounts versus small-to-midsize accounts. Leaning towards large accounts while creating the Target Account List has valuable benefits:
- Revenue growth in large accounts acting as compound interest.
- Lower account acquisition cost due to lesser spend on hunters and marketing.
- Forcing function to build strong relationships with fewer external stakeholders.
- Higher degree of revenue stability during recessions.
- Better accuracy in forecasting for future revenue growth.
One large account dwarfs many equal split small-to-midsize accounts combined. Leverage less to create more!
Treating Account as the Unit of Measurement
Accounts define salespeople. Treat account(s) as the unit of measurement for recognition. And quota achievement as the unit of measurement for compensation. This applies to both hunters and farmers. It builds ownership, holds weight and simplifies sales.
This makes account plans the starting point for discussions with the sales team. It is like detailed planning before a special forces mission. A good account plan includes these components:
- People:
- Current and potential stakeholders.
- Common friendly connections.
- People movement tracker.
- Products:
- Current account deployment landscape.
- Potential vendors for partnership.
- Priorities:
- Strategic and operational goals of executive management.
- Competitor alignment of stakeholders.
- Career aspirations of stakeholders.
- Plan:
- Help needed from the startup founding team.
- Total revenue potential for each account.
- Mapping to similar existing accounts.
In essence, depth is key. Salespeople should master the process of growing one account. And then tweak it to create a playbook for replicating across future accounts.
Building Account-Focused Teams
Acquiring a new client and growing the client are two distinct sales processes. Account stakeholders' knowledge of your product and startup will change during this time. They will interact more with the startup team and use the product once they are a customer. Intimacy reduces the room for error. Account stakeholders will have expectations from the product and the team. Hence, creating account-focused teams early-on is a good idea. This also ensures the core engineering team is not the first line of interruption. Following team designs have yielded high growth:
- Separating Hunters and Farmers:
- Separate the sales team into hunters and farmers as soon as possible. Hunters get net-new accounts and farmers grow existing accounts. It is a good practice to ensure hunter overlap with farmers for a defined time. Accounts treat cold cutoffs as bait-and-switch.
- Creating an Overlay Support Structure:
- Large accounts need more services. Each of these services will become an independent account service team over time:
- Third-party integrations, APIs, and hooks to products that are already deployed.
- Performance and Interoperability Testing with adjacent products.
- Compliance and Certifications.
- Professional Services.
- Technical Support.
- Large accounts need more services. Each of these services will become an independent account service team over time:
Leveraging the Land and Expand Strategy
Once inside the account, the salesperson should figure out a way to create a home base within the account. This can be a combination of regular physical presence and high-frequency remote interactions. Four well-executed strategies can help create compounding revenue growth:
- Donning the Program Manager Role:
- Maniacal focus on execution by the account service team. Avoiding early execution mistakes will keep open the future doors of revenue.
- Finding the Sponsors:
- Sponsors are like godparents. They will enable you for future sales. In most cases, this person is the Point of Pressure.
- Practicing the Art of Parallelism:
- Best sales performers don't wait for the first stakeholder to provide a reference. They start building relationships with potential stakeholders.
- Leveraging the Key Startup Team Members:
- Bring out the startup founding team and key members in front of the account stakeholders. This will help in getting internal support whenever issues arise. If startup team members are already aware of the account dynamics, they will have skin in the game.
Growing the enterprise accounts takes a different mindset than cracking them. Happy scaling!
Let's Talk: If you have a true experience that resonates, please send me an email.
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